Solved: contacts storage using up too much space on Android

March 25, 2011

I’ve been slowly falling out of love with my Android HTC Desire over the past few months. It’s been slowing down and frequently running out of space. The contacts storage on the device kept growing and growing – eventually reaching 40Mb – and because it could only be stored on internally and not on the SD card, it was killing everything else.

I tried a number of options – turning off sync on my Exchange account, turning off sync on my Gmail account, removing the Facebook and Twitter apps – none of them made a difference. Contacts storage kept on growing, to the point that I had to keep removing apps that I like just to keep the phone running. Eventually it stopped receiving email and there were no more apps to remove.

I started to wish I’d bought an iPhone – I pretty much only use my phone, contacts, calendar, email, Spotify, Chicmi and Twitter, all of which are available on both platforms.

But then I took some drastic action, and came up with a procedure to fix the issue. Here’s a step by step guide:

Step 1 – Turn off sync

Firstly, turn off sync. Go to Settings > Accounts & Sync and go through each of your accounts, stopping them from syncing with your contacts.

Step 2 – Backup your contacts

The following actions will not delete your contacts from your Gmail or Exchange accounts, but it’s always best to be sure in case something in your settings means that they do get deleted. It’s a small chance, but better safe than sorry.

In Outlook on your computer (I’m using Outlook for Mac), go to File > Export, select only Contacts and export them to a file on disk.

In Gmail on your computer go to Contacts then in the More Actions menu select Export and save all of your contacts to a Google CSV file.

Step 3 – Backup your phone contacts

Just in case you’ve got contacts that are only saved to your phone and not saved in Exchange or Google, go to People in your phone, press Menu, select Import/Export > Export to SD Card, and select to export your Phone contacts. In my case it told me there was nothing to save.

Step 4 – Delete your contacts storage

Now the big step. What we’re going to do is wipe your entire contacts database – settings, contacts, everything. Providing you’re like me and sync all of your contacts with Exchange or Gmail, then this should be no issue – as soon as you resync your contacts will return exactly as they are now. But if you’ve got contacts that you store locally only on your phone, then these will be wiped.

But don’t worry about that too much – you’ve backed all of those up hopefully in step three! So just need to restore them if you can’t find someone.

So go to Settings > Applications > Manage Applications and find Contacts Storage in the All tab. Press Clear Data and confirm that you want to clear. Your contacts storage will go from many MBs to zero.

Step 5 – Turn on sync again

This was the step that made me nervous. When you turn on sync, does it wipe all of your remote contacts, or does it reimport your remote contacts? Thankfully, it just reimports them all. Go to Settings > Accounts & Sync and re-enable sync for all of your mail accounts. It might take a few minutes, but your phone will reimport all of your contacts in the background.

That’s it!

That’s all I had to do. My contacts storage has gone from 40MB to 400KB and my phone is significantly faster and more responsive. And while I’m sure it will start to build back up again over time, at least I know how to fix it again in future. And let’s hope before then HTC or Google fix the issue.

Thankfully I don’t need to join the cult of iPhone quite yet…

Update: This post remains popular over a year after it was published so it’s obvious that lots of people have been having similar issues. I recently upgraded to a Samsung Galaxy S3 and haven’t had any similar issues since, so it seems that the latest versions of Android do make the problem go away. So if you’re consistently having problems still, maybe an upgrade will help!

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I’m having a similar problem with the HTC Hero. My contacts file is around 56 MB, and I’m certain it’s all the Facebook updates/photos and such it downloads and saves. Saving to SD card would really solve the problem…

Hi,
I have been having the same problem. My contacts file has been breeding like rabbits and squeezing everything out.
Thanks so much for this. It works.
Except that, even though I turned off sync in ‘accounts & sync’ the phone continued to sync with Gmail contacts. I hit the ‘stop sync’ button and then cleared the Contacts data file again.
Because of all the syncing with Facebook and Gmail, I was getting duplicates upon duplicates!
I now leave all syncing with Gmail & Facebook OFF. (the Gmail Calendar sync, never worked anyhow!)
I now just sync with Outlook.
I did the hard thing and waded through my Outlook contacts and deleted every duplicate. Then exported a copy for backup.
I then deleted every contact in my Outlook, AND in Gmail AND my phone.
I synced and my Contacts file dropped from 25mb to 2.5mb!
Whew! I now have room on the phone to load up more fun stuff.

Seems to be working. Thank you!
I went from 115 MB down to 9 MB, though it doesn’t appear to be done resyncing yet (after 15 mins!). Nonetheless, I’m sure it’s mostly finished, and the phone is now much zippier, which is awesome.
Thanks again.

Eh, ended up with 18 MB. Big improvement. I’m just wondering if there’s anything else I can do to trim this down a bit. I seriously doubt I have that many more contacts than, say, your average networker (~900, but I know people who have like 4,000 contacts!).
If anyone has any ideas, I’m all ears 🙂

Thank you so much. I use my twitter and facebook for business and so had about 12,000 contacts in my phone that I didn’t know how to get rid of-they were using up 285mb! After having the phone a week it was nearly full. Great fix!

How do we know, how much space contact files is taking ? Also, in my gmail contacts, I only see my original ‘mail only’ contacts (except a few who have added their number in their gmail account) I don’t see any phone numbers. Now, why the hell did google think that I’d want same contact list in my phone as I have in gmail account ? If I sync, I get all the mail contacts in my phone book but NO phone contacts in gmail/contacts. Even on my old Nokia 5310, I could export/import contacts separately. Goolgle/Android integration stinks.

Thanks tons! Came across this post and it worked! My contacts file was *666* MB (if that’s not an interesting enough… and large enough… number), and this got it WAY down. We’ll see how long it lasts, but thanks!

My galaxy note 10.1 was about to seriously crash when i decided for the same option , surprising was that the contact storage apk was like 6gigs and 0bytes of my 16gig internal mem wwas available. Now im fast again…

Same problem only mine is WAAAYYY higher than everyones here. Mine has ballooned up to 3.8GB. On top of that every time I was deleting apps to get rid of the storage space error, Contacts Storage grows to eat up the extra space!!

I have a Samsung S2. I noticed that Contact Storage getting fat only when I entered Canada using a Canadian SIM Cards. I have used my S2 for two years in Hong Kong and I have 2000 records sync to Outlook and the size in Contact Storage was only 40M without that problem of growing fatter and fatter and used up all the memory space. I always turn off all other app sync.

But last sept when I came to Canada, my contact space just boomed and became 1G in size over night with all other app sync turned off!!! Now, this is the second time happening to me. I came in Canada, replaced a Canadian SIM Card, and boomed.

Any other suggestion to avoid the problem? I know all i need is to wipe clean the Contact Storage, and resync with my Outlook…but I hate doing that every other night. I began to suspect something to do with North America phone network doing something behind my back?

Thank you so much for this. I, like you, was constantly having to uninstall apps or clear their data just to get rid of the “Low disk space” warning and allow sync to work properly. My contacts storage was 108MB so I’m very pleased to stretch a bit more life out of my aging phone! Thanks again!

Excellent! It’s Apr 30, 2014. Galaxy S3. “Contacts Storage” was 4.3GB!! I got to step 3, but Contacts wouldn’t quit thinking about searching for contacts. I couldn’t use the menu button. Upon re-boot, Contacts was workable. I exported contacts according to Step 3, but didn’t need to go to Step4 … Contacts Storage was 25.3MB. Jumped to step5, and we’re back in business! Thanks!

Though it is a very old post it is relevant to my Micromax Canvas HD Android 4.1.2. I have contacts of 110mb and creating very serious problem. Looking forward to fix as per your words.
Thank you very much.
I have contacts majority in phone storage but also in few Gmail accounts too. I will be having much trouble in dealing with this situation.

I have the same problem on my Samsung Galaxy Note 2 – I have like 4 gigs of contacts and every time I delete apps to make room, the room gets filled up.
I have Master Sync turned off and have cancelled syncs on the others.

BIG PROBLEM: I can’t load my contacts… it keeps saying “Updating contact list” but it never finishes. This prohibits me form getting to the menu to export to SD card.